Journey to the Virtual World

VMware vCenter Support Assistant 6.0

There are many articles explaining this useful little products, so I will just focus on items that I was not able to find. I’d recommend you read this great post by Vladan.

Installation is pretty straight forward as it is a virtual appliance. You know you’ve got the deployment right when you have the console screen looking like this below. I was expecting it to show FQDN instead of IP.

The above should have stated that you should login with root. This useful KB Article has a small mistake. The password is not specified during install. Rather it is hard-coded to vmware. I learned this from a great post by Chris Wahl here.

Once you login, you will see the following screen:

Enter your vSphere 6 Platform Service Controller address. It will automatically append the https, the port number and the rest of the URL. You just need to type the IP or FQDN.

Once it finds it, you need to register. I use the usual administrator@vsphere.local.

Click Finish in the above screen. You will see the screen below. I created a separate service account so I can tell if it is Support Assistant that login. There is a minor limitation here, it shows only 1 vCenter. There are actually 2 vCenter Servers in the lab, sharing the same PSC. I am not able to add the second one manually as it says it’s not finding it.

Click Next button. The rest is pretty straight forward, and Chris Wahl has explained it here. As Chris said it, the rest of the configuration is done at the vSphere Web Client. This is what mine looks like after I configured it. Remember I wrote it is a minor issue that it does now show my second vCenter? That’s because it actually does see it. The screenshot below it automatically recognises both.

Besides getting the email notification, it actually integrates into your vSphere Web Client and put all the issues it find there. To see it, you go to Monitor –> Issues. There is a new category under Triggered Alarms.

You can see the result of the scheduled collection in the Monitor tab. I scheduled mine and the first run was successfully completed, as you can see below.